flynn0013

Starting off this month with a “Done in one” advice article on poster design by Tullio Rossi. I disagree with a few very minor points (bullet points are not your friend ), but overall very good! Hat tip to Anna Clemens .  • • • • • A five tweet thread from Tolpa Studies from the recent Twitter conference, #BTCon18, about visual literacy.  • • • • • This guide on making graphs more readable is very good. One of the key things in this graph makeover and why it works is the designer listened to what the scientists said about it . They used the expertise to defined the graph’s “talking points”, so to speak. Hat tip to Garr Reynolds.  • • • • • I recommend against tables on posters almost always. But if you must have a table, make it a nice table. This is a nice animated makeover of a table by Joey Cherderchuk from Dark Horse Analytics. Hat tip to Catherine Crompton  • • • • • Picture i...

A colleague of mine was at the 9th Bird Working Group Meeting, The archaeology of human-bird interactions . He snapped a pic of a poster by Beatrice Demarchi which he thought would interest me. It did. I contacted Bea... who thought I was punking her. I almost binned the message thinking that it was a joke then I figured that it must have been real as not many people know about the Bird Working Group! :) She was nice enough to send along a better version of the poster. Click to enlarge! I love the clarity and simplicity of vision here. I love how text and visuals, instead of being two separate elements, are fused into one element. The words are the picture. I was impressed, because I had tried to design something similar – text forming the outline of a shape – for a t-shirt. I was not able to make the text fit the shape anywhere near as well as Bea did. She explained how she did it (lightly edited): I popped an image of the bird into Adobe Illustrator, and then text that sort...

Today’s poster is contributed by Bayo Adeniji. Click to enlarge! Bayo wrote (lightly edited): Can you spot the influence of the Better Posters blog in the poster? I hoped to create a poster that was uncluttered and which had a clear message devoid of management theory jargon. My PhD is multi-disciplinary, and I’m learning to straddle the divide so I don’t alienate either fields. My worry though, is the issue of oversimplification. I replied: I think “oversimplification” is a worry too many people have. It's the kind of thing that makes undergraduates reach for a thesaurus when writing essays, n the mistaken belief longer, rarer words make them sound smarter. They are judged less intelligent by readers when they do that. Simple does not mean stupid. While Bayo was nice enough to say this blog influenced the poster, I never would have made a poster that looks like this. It’s very much Bayo’s own creation. I’ve talked before about using circles to break up the monotony of rectangl...

Asad Sayeed nominated this poster for a design award. You really need to click to enlarge this one to appreciate it: You can see it in pieces in first author Gavin Abercrombie’s Twitter feed . “Lessons from comics” is something of a recurring theme on this blog . And I’ve featured posters that used the vocabulary of comics before, but this might be one of the best examples I’ve seen. The poster makes the “row by row” reading order clear because the panel heights are all identical, so there is a straight horizontal gutter marking out each row. The panel widths vary, so there is no white gutter running down the page that suggests “columns” to your eyes. The one area where I would try a few things differently is the title. I’d use one typeface for the title instead of two. The two styles are just similar enough that the combination looks like it could be a mistake instead of a choice. I’d also like to see the looser, freehand style used through the rest of the poster reflected in th...

Regular readers will know of my distaste for boxes around things on posters. But that’s doubled for boxes with round corners. There is a “square peg in a round hole” problem. Blocks of text typically “want” to be rectangular. The corners of the rectangle implied by the text fight with the round corners of the box. Most graphs want to be rectangular, too. And most photographs. PowerPoint has some sort of algorithm that rounds the corners more for bigger boxes. So if your boxes are different sizes – which they almost always are on posters – your corners are going to be rounded off by different amounts. Click to enlarge! You can fix this tweaking the corners by hand. There’s a yellow dot near one corner of the box that you can drag to make the corner more or less rounded. The problem is that to do this, you have to recognize it as a problem!

Poster season has started, so we have people tweeting the coolest ones. Here is one by Alison Wardlow: She starts with a blank page, then draws the poster while explaining her theory. Bold move. And people told me it couldn’t be done when I suggested this years ago ! Hat tip to Nancy Chen and Emily Austen . and B. Haas . • • • • • • The biggest debate in typography rears its ugly head again. One space or two after a period ? I’ll save you a click. The effects are small – at best. The study was done with a monospaced font, which you rarely see any more. It may not apply to most typefaces you will see. • • • • • • Confession: I’ve been interested in conference badges since I read this article about them in American Scientist . I keep scans of my badges from meetings I’ve been to. So I was interested in this website , which does for conference badges what this blog tries to do for posters (though it doesn’t seem to be updated). It sprung o...

I get emails! Yesterday, I got email asking, “How can I stop posters from fading over time?” I’ve touched on this in the blog briefly , but did a little more digging. I remembered from working with people who supervised our departmental plotter printers was that there were different inks available for the printer. Some were billed as more fade resistant than others. But I quickly found the situation is more complicated than that, based on this page about consumer inkjet printers. The printer manufacturer and the paper and the ink are all important variables in determining fade resistance. To start, there are various paper types. Microporous paper is more fade resistant that cast coated paper. Matte paper holds colour longer than glossy paper, according to this page .Which, again, is a trade off. Personally, I think glossy finishes looks sharper and better than matte finishes in the short term. Ink types also come in a few different varieties. This page divided inks into dye- and p...